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By Khademul Islam A sail down the ageless rivers of Bangladesh is a reminder that 20 years from now the teeming humanity and its way of life, the abundant flora and fauna will disappear as a consequence of climate change. A rise in sea surface temperatures and levels could mean that 10% of Bangladesh would be under water in 20 years
Nijhum Dip is a little island at the tip of a much larger one called Hatiya, perched in the Bay of Bengal. Nijhum is the Bengali word for desolate; dip means island. Innumerable rivers crisscross Bangladesh. From airplane windows, the land is a silvery lacework of glinting, glimmering water. Boats and sails and water and steamer ghats define the country. As the rivers divide and join and divide again to wend their serpentine ways and finally empty into the Bay, they cut deep grooves and channels in the coastline, fragmenting it into a broken, jagged line of islands and islets and shifting sand shoals (called chars). The main channel is the one created by three major river systems joining as one before draining into the sea. The Ganga flows into Bangladesh from its western border with India, while the Brahmaputra (or Jamuna as we call it) enters from the top and meets the former hundreds of miles down at Goalundo to become a single river known as the Padma. From India’s northeastern states, a host of rivers enter Bangladesh to eventually join and become the Meghna (or, more properly, the Upper Meghna). It meets the Padma near Chandpur, a convergence that creates that magnificent river known as the Meghna, whose waters stretch from horizon to horizon as it flows majestically to empty, in a vast funnel-shaped estuary, into the Indian Ocean. It is this central part of the coastline that is the most broken up due to the tumultuous discharge of such an immense volume of water, breaking it up into a number of small and large islands, constantly depositing a tremendous amount of fertile silt that creates new chars even as it sweeps away old ones. During the monsoons, the rush of water is overwhelming, with major riverbank erosion where entire villages disappear into the raging waters and tens of thousands of people are suddenly rendered homeless and are forced to turn to the cities in search of food and work. One such coastal island is Hatiya, at whose southern tip is Nijhum Dip. In February this year, four of us went on a trip to Nijhum Dip. The journey from Dhaka is by passenger launch through a series of interlinking rivers to the Meghna; then down the Meghna to Hatiya. At Hatiya, one has to switch to a bot-boti -- a country boat named after the sound of its diesel engine -- for the four-hour stretch to Nijhum Dip. We boarded the launch from Sadarghat terminal on the Buriganga (so named as the Ganga, after her enormous travels, is now considered a buri, an old woman). During the Raj, cannons would boom whenever the Nawab of Dhaka sailed by the ghat (dock) to his pink riverside palace of Ahsan Manzil. Today, Sadarghat is a steamy cauldron of pressing humanity, its sounds an incessant paan-stained human roar, with touts running coolie-and-ticket rackets. Our launch, the M V Panama, was packed to the gills with passengers; on the cheap-ticket deck families camped out on bedsheets spread on the floor. At first sight it looked like a mass of children, babies, cigarette vendors, women in purdah, radios, tiffins, chickens and voluble men. Yet, walking among them I was able to discern careful territorial demarcations -- bedsheets inches apart but rarely stepped on as people scrupulously kept to the narrow divides in between that functioned as aisles. Not that our two ‘cabins’ were anything special -- we had done our bookings too late to get the good ones. They were basically holes in the wall with room for two people to lie side-by-side. But we were not in them much as we preferred the foredeck or the chairs by the side railings. As the launch gave its piercing whistle and slowly peeled away from the dock we stood excitedly with the others on deck. There is nothing quite like setting sail on water! The Buriganga’s waters are dark, oily and smelly. River pollution is rampant in Bangladesh. ‘Save our Rivers’ scream newspaper headlines, while talking heads on television debate the subject to death. Environmental experts simply shake their heads when the topic comes up, methodically listing a line of grim statistics on everything from dead marine life to lethal toxicity levels. For decades now, raw untreated sewage from a teeming city of 12 million has been dumped into the Buriganga, mixed with toxic chemicals from the old tanneries in Hazaribagh and newer garments, textiles, dyeing and chemical plants spawned by a haphazard industrialisation drive over the last two decades.  Effluent treatment plants are written into law, and indeed have been constructed by the more modern factories. But nobody switches them on! The owners say they are too expensive; they make their products uncompetitive on the international market especially in the wake of the global recession. So it is the rivers that continue to bear the brunt of the toxic assault. We soon left the Buriganga and slipped into the Dhaleswari river, then onto the Sitalakhaya river whose waters are almost unbearable to look at. No surprise! This is Bangladesh’s most polluted river. It was evening when we steamed onto the lovely, clear waters of the Meghna. A river breeze blew as the light of the setting sun slanted over the water, turning it gold and silver-blue. A sort of collective pang entered our souls. Oh, this our land of rivers! Some time later, as darkness fell, the wind got stronger and we entered the mohona -- the confluence -- where the waters of the Padma, Jamuna and Upper Meghna become the single river Meghna. The sweep of the river is breathtaking! Nothing but water below and sky above. Other launches slipped by and in the distance we could see the flickering lights of kerosene lamps on tiny country fishing boats. We ordered dinner -- rice, chilli chicken and dal -- and ate it as a full moon rose. Then we sat by the railing on chairs and gazed at the river, discreetly sipping vodka martinis. Someone was playing the flute on deck. Around 2 in the morning, with the waters bathed in brilliant moonlight, we saw sand shoals appear in spots. The water was extremely shallow now. We went up to the wheelhouse where the ‘sarang master’ informed us that while water levels during winter were naturally low in places, he, wanting to take a shortcut, had risked entering a narrow ‘side channel’ during bhata, or receding tide. We were at the mouth of the estuary which is subject to shifting tides. The way ahead was tricky. The launch had slowed to a crawl and a sailor posted on the lower deck near the bow leaned out with a pole to ‘sound’ the water -- he dipped his pole into the water periodically and chanted out the depth in a rhythmic sing-song voice: Ek bao dui haat, or Ek bao ek haat (ek is, of course, one, and bao we learnt is six feet; haat here is an arm’s length). The four of us looked at each other in amazement, all thinking the same thing: Rabindranath Tagore! This is the same chant that a dying, feverish boy hears in the famous short story by Tagore, Chuti, as he dreams of returning by boat from an alien Calcutta back to his village home. We felt as if we too were dream-sailing in our very own delirium, our boat zigzagging through a moonscape with bao chants guiding it through the navigable depths in the deathly still night… In the morning the river was broad and deep again, a placid blue-grey sheet of water under a winter sun. We returned to the wheelhouse with steaming cups of tea to find the master sarang’s ‘helper’ now at the wheel. His steamer vocabulary puzzled us, until we figured out the Bengali corruption of the original English words: ‘Tauber’ comes from ‘Stop her’, the command to stop the boat. ‘Goan’ is ‘Go on’, ‘Begar’ has evolved from ‘Back her’. One term, ‘Maja day’, which means giving work orders, comes from the Urdu of old Dhaka in the nawab era when hundreds of the city’s inhabitants used to fly kites. ‘Maja’ comes from the Urdu word ‘manja’ meaning sharpened kite string streaming out of its spool! We docked at Hatiya ghat around noon. Voices filled the air; schoolchildren in NGO-donated uniforms looked on as the passengers disembarked and new ones embarked via a narrow gangplank anchored in the mud. Sun-blackened men strained to bring on board chicken coops and huge baskets of vegetables to be taken back to Dhaka. If the load is heavy the men urge each other on by shouting in rhythmic unison: ‘Haiya haiya ray haiya’ -- a line from an old Bhatiali river song. To our east is Sandwip island (pronounced ‘Shone Dip’), and beyond it Chittagong. To our west lie chars and islands like pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle, the biggest being Bhola. Beyond Bhola are Pirojpur, Patuakhali and Barguna, fronted by the forests of the Sunderbans. Those areas were badly battered by Cyclone Sidr, in November 2007. Communication networks were destroyed, electric and irrigation lines downed, houses, livestock and seed stocks blown away and around 5,000 school/college buildings flattened (which means that 1.5 million children now stay at home; 49% of them girls). One million people remain outside the official food security network, prey to constant hunger. Had it not been for the forests of the Sunderbans serving as a giant wind and water breaker, the human toll would have been much higher. But in saving lives the forests and local biodiversity took a severe beating: 31% of the trees here were destroyed. But the worst may yet be coming. All this -- the islands, the chars, the boats and homes and villages and communities, the entire coast -- could disappear under the impact of climate change. A flat deltaic plain that is barely above sea level, Bangladesh will be one of the countries worst affected by climate change. The two critical factors are an increase in sea surface temperatures and a rise in sea water levels. A rise in water levels would mean that around 10% of Bangladesh’s land mass could sink beneath the sea. While 10% may not sound like much on paper, for Bangladesh the results will be catastrophic, forcing people to flee upward and inland, leading to a huge increase in the number of internal refugees with no alternative but to migrate to the cities to beg. Rising sea levels would mean that rivers cannot empty as much as they normally do (a phenomenon known as ‘backwater effect’) causing even more river erosion and adding to the total number of displaced persons and penniless migrants. There will be greater food shortages with loss of cultivable land, and unpredictable, drastic changes in rainfall patterns, prompting drought and floods. A huge part of the Sunderbans will likely vanish, and with it a natural barrier to the intrusion of saline water and storm surges. Increased salinity in the next belt of surviving cropland will make the land uncultivable. A rise in sea surface temperatures will increase both the frequency and intensity of cyclones that will hit deeper inland and cause far more damage, as, with the old coastline gone, the funnel-shaped estuary will now be in a perfect position to suck in cyclonic winds with their accompanying tidal bores and storm surges. All the beauty I was witnessing as we chugged along in the bot-boti towards Nijhum Dip -- the egrets along the water’s edge, Hatiya on our left, the shades and smell of blue ocean waters, the boatman with his lean, sunburnt face, the distinct coastal dialects and peoples shaped over centuries of living at the sea’s edge, varieties of fish and wildlife -- everything could vanish by 2030 in a tragedy of huge proportions if the earth warms up, glaciers melt, holes in the ozone layer get thinner and wider, and the seas rise. Gulls wheeled in the sky above, the sun burned down on us as we forged ahead on our four-hour trip. At last we arrived at Nijhum Dip, entering a narrow channel at whose end small fishing boats were tied. The island has a small, privately-run guesthouse taken over from the government. It’s clean and comfortable, with green checkered bedsheets and doors whose wood had the same dark grain as the prow of the bot-boti. In the five days that followed, we walked along village paths, sipped tea at stalls that looked out onto the sea, and woke up to watch the sunlight play on a gigantic shimul (silk cotton) tree ablaze with scarlet flowers; in its vast shade a carpet of fallen flowers was as lush as one from Ferghana. We boated through creeks as a huge stag stared at us from the underbrush, watched kingfishers dive cleanly into muddy, shaded waters, spotted vast herds of deer that come an hour before sunset to a salt lick (incidentally, Nijhum Dip has 11,000 inhabitants and 15,000 deer!). We ate curried duck and coarse rice and steamed crab, spurred on by appetites made keen by walking in the fresh air. The smell of the city and the urban grime had left our bodies. The squawking and yelling, the din and smoke and bad air, and the frayed tempers… I would wake up at dawn to watch men build sea-going boats whose style and design had been handed down for generations. Beneath the swaying palm trees they would bend and shape wood, assess the grain and heft of the huge single block of teak wood for the prow, brought from Myanmar, triple-layer the hull, make a snug galley kitchen beneath the deck, paint bright blue strips on the housing… The first time we went to the western side of the island, we saw that the water was white instead of blue, until we realised that there were so many ducks on the water that it looked white! It seemed so surreal that all this could disappear within 20 years, permanently, because we humans are wreaking havoc on this small planet of ours. (Khademul Islam is a Bangladeshi writer. He is currently working on a non-fiction book) Infochange News & Features, October 2009 |
